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Mission creep watch, the continuing series
From today’s WaPo: An operation billed as a humanitarian intervention in Libya by President Obama was described in starkly more military terms Thursday by the administration’s top two defense officials. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told lawmakers that continuing coalition attacks on Libyan government troops — even when they were not directly threatening civilians —…
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The anti-Piper
Process theologian John Cobb’s reflections on the earthquake in Japan make for an interesting contrast with John Piper’s recent statements. From the perspective of process thought, not only human choices, but even inanimate nature enjoys a certain autonomy: For process thought, however, the contrast of human events and natural ones is not quite this sharp.…
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Time article on the debate over “humane” meat-eating
This article from Time provides one of the best overviews I’ve seen in a mainstream publication about the issues surrounding factory farms and the use of animals for food. It notes that there’s debate among “humane” meat proponents, vegetarians, and vegans about whether it’s okay to use animals for food at all, but also highlights…
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Friday Links
–John Cohn at The New Republic on the end of “compassionate conservatism.” –Should life be more like a game? — The rise of white identity politics in DC? –From Book Forum, a collection of links on how we treat animals. (I guess that makes this a meta-link?) –How Pearl Jam went from being the biggest…
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The bishops vs. Elizabeth Johnson
The US Catholic bishops’ committee on doctrine is accusing feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson of “criticiz[ing] and … revis[ing] in a radical fashion the conception of God revealed in Scripture and taught by the Magisterium” in her recent book Quest for the Living God. What seems to be at issue is Johnson’s contention–more fully fleshed out…
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Unredeemed history and Christian anti-Judaism
In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to…
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Divine determinism and divine sovereignty
Marvin argues that a doctrine of divine determinism–that everything that happens, even apparently horrible things like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, is an expression of God’s will–is actually a more comforting doctrine than people sometimes give it credit for: If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as…
